Chicago Hack Weekend April 2013

You're invited to the hack weekend on 26-28 April 2013 in Chicago. If it's anything like the events in London, it'll be a smorgasbord of hard-core development, tutorials and social interaction! Special thanks to Richard for the template and inspiration for this page and event.

Hack Weekend?

An OpenStreetMap "Hack Weekend" is a local event for technical work to improve OpenStreetMap. This may be development of the "core" components, the editors, or any other side projects and pet projects we fancy hacking on. OpenStreetMap has development tasks sprouting from it in all directions. There's work to do in almost any programming language, as well as tasks like documentation, and even some non-technical graphics design and translation tasks.

We mostly take a fairly unstructured free-form format. People turn up and start beavering away on something, or they turn up and see what they can help with. However we can also run more structured workshops if there is demand.

Audience

This event is part OSM social event, part technical workshop. The social events are open to the entire OpenStreetMap community.

Social events

The Friday night Meet and Greet and the Saturday night dinner and Mappy Hour are open to the OpenStreetMap community at large. Mappers and users, App developers and curious newcomers, all are welcome to mix and mingle with the Hack Weekend attendees. We'll each have to pick up our own tab, of course.

Technical workshop

Saturday and Sunday at the Hack Weekend are set up for coding, compiling, theming and testing.

The goal is to allow more programmers and developers to feel comfortable contributing code, etc. to the core functions of OpenStreetMap. The Hack Weekend is intended for programmers, developers, documentation writers, designers, UI / UX experts, cartographers, and all those other skills that go into improving OpenStreetMap infrastructure.

Qualifications

"But, I don't contribute code to OpenStreetMap like those core developers. The Hack Weekend isn't for me ..."

It might be perfect for you. You don't contribute code to OSM yet, but do you want to? That's one of the long term goals. Allow you to get yourself comfortable enough to submit code.

A Hack Weekend is not the place to learn how to program, or to learn "what is a renderer?" A Hack Weekend is an ideal place to use your expertise with your favorite technical tools to make an improvement for the OpenStreetMap community.

You should:

know which tools you want to use

know how to use those tools

know which problem(s) you want to solve

know how your solution would fit in the OpenStreetMap world

bring your programming environment with you

be comfortable programming in a room with other programmers

If you have only a few of these items clear now, you should clarify more of them in the weeks leading up to the event. You might ask on the #osm irc irc.oftc.net if you want help with these questions.